When a customer of an electric utility suffers a power outage, the customer typically must notify the electric utility of the power outage. In the event that the power outage occurs in the middle of the night or when the customer is otherwise unable to detect the outage, the residence or facility may go without electricity for a considerable amount of time. In instances where the continuous supply of power is crucial to the customer, such as for hospitals, manufacturing facilities and food storage facilities, this conventional outage notification process can severely affect the customer's operations.
Accordingly, a number of complex and expensive devices have been employed in the past to detect power outages and report them to the electric utilities. Such devices may implement a connection to the power supply at the customer location coupled to the serial port of personal computers dedicated for outage notification. Once an outage is detected at the serial port and a communication from the personal computer has been received by the electric utility, the electric utility may dispatch the appropriate technicians to re-establish power or repair the problem causing the outage. Unfortunately, such systems suffer from severe limitations with respect to efficiently and cost effectively dealing with power outages at the customer location. To illustrate, the use of such systems typically require the use of a personal computer or workstation, either of which generally are expensive to purchase and maintain. Further, such systems typically notify the electric utility in the event that power supply is lost on any circuit, resulting in wasted time and effort on the electric utility's part when the cause of the power outage to the circuit results from a local cause at the customer location and not from a problem for which the electric utility is responsible.